A founding Russia-gate myth is that all 17
U.S. intelligence agencies agreed that
Russia hacked into and distributed
Democratic emails, a falsehood that The New
York Times has belatedly retracted, reports
Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

June 30,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- The New York Times has finally admitted that
one of the favorite Russia-gate canards – that
all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred on
the assessment of Russian hacking of Democratic
emails – is false.

On Thursday, the Times appended
a correction to a June 25 article
that had repeated the false claim, which has
been used by Democrats and the mainstream media
for months to brush aside any doubts about the
foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and
portray President Trump as delusional for
doubting what all 17 intelligence agencies
supposedly knew to be true.

In the
Times’ White House Memo of June 25,
correspondent Maggie Haberman mocked Trump for
“still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact
agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies
that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the
attacks, and did it to help get him elected.”

However, on Thursday, the Times – while leaving
most of Haberman’s ridicule of Trump in place –
noted in a correction that the relevant
intelligence “assessment was made by four
intelligence agencies — the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence, the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and the National Security Agency.
The assessment was not approved by all 17
organizations in the American intelligence
community.”

The
Times’ grudging correction was vindication for
some Russia-gate skeptics who had questioned the
claim of a full-scale intelligence assessment,
which would usually take the form of a National
Intelligence Estimate (or NIE), a product that
seeks out the views of the entire Intelligence
Community and includes dissents.

The reality of a more narrowly based Russia-gate
assessment was
admitted in May
by President Obama’s Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper and Obama’s CIA
Director John Brennan in sworn congressional
testimony.

Clapper
testified
before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on May 8
that the Russia-hacking claim came from a
“special intelligence community assessment” (or
ICA) produced by selected analysts from the CIA,
NSA and FBI, “a coordinated product from three
agencies – CIA, NSA, and the FBI – not all 17
components of the intelligence community,” the
former DNI said.

Clapper
further acknowledged that the analysts who
produced the Jan. 6 assessment on alleged
Russian hacking were “hand-picked” from the CIA,
FBI and NSA.

Yet, as any intelligence expert will tell you,
if you “hand-pick” the analysts, you are really
hand-picking the conclusion. For instance, if
the analysts were known to be hard-liners on
Russia or supporters of Hillary Clinton, they
could be expected to deliver the
one-sided report
that they did.

Politicized Intelligence

In the
history of U.S. intelligence, we have seen how
this selective approach has worked, such as the
phony determination of the Reagan administration
pinning the attempted assassination of Pope John
Paul II and other acts of terror on the Soviet
Union.

The
point of enlisting the broader intelligence
community – and incorporating dissents into a
final report – is to guard against such
“stove-piping” of intelligence that delivers the
politically desired result but ultimately
distorts reality.

Another painful example of politicized
intelligence was President George W. Bush’s 2002
National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD
that
removed State Department and other dissents
from the declassified version that was given to
the public.

Since
Clapper’s and Brennan’s testimony in May, the
Times and other mainstream news outlets have
avoided a direct contradiction of their earlier
acceptance of the 17-intelligence-agencies
canard by simply referring to a judgment by “the
intelligence community.”

That
finessing of their earlier errors has allowed
Hillary Clinton and other senior Democrats to
continue referencing this fictional consensus
without challenge, at least in the mainstream
media.

For instance, on May 31 at a technology
conference in California,
Clinton referred
to the Jan. 6
report,
asserting that “Seventeen agencies, all in
agreement, which I know from my experience as a
Senator and Secretary of State, is hard to get.
They concluded with high confidence that the
Russians ran an extensive information war
campaign against my campaign, to influence
voters in the election.”

The
failure of the major news organizations to
clarify this point about the 17 agencies may
have contributed to Haberman’s mistake on June
25 as she simply repeated the groupthink that
nearly all the Important People in Washington
just knew to be true.

But the
Times’ belated correction also underscores the
growing sense that the U.S. mainstream media has
joined in a political vendetta against Trump and
has cast aside professional standards to the
point of repeating false claims designed to
denigrate him.

That,
in turn, plays into Trump’s Twitter complaints
that he and his administration are the targets
of a “witch hunt” led by the “fake news” media,
a grievance that appears to be energizing his
supporters and could discredit whatever ongoing
investigations eventually conclude.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many
of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his
latest book,
America’s Stolen Narrative,
either in print
here or as an
e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com).

The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.

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